#sci

Seances occur only in darkened rooms, where the ghostly visitors can be seen dimly at best. If we turn up the lights a little, so we have a chance to see what’s going on, the spirits vanish. They’re shy, we’re told, and some of us believe it. In twentieth-century parapsychology laboratories, there is the ‘observer effect’: those described as gifted psychics find that their powers diminish markedly whenever sceptics arrive, and disappear altogether in the presence of a conjuror as skilled as James Randi. What they need is darkness and gullibility. ↗

— Carl Sagan

#science

Science, the agent that once promised to eradicate the supernatural, had, through the nuclear threat, resurrected it. Magic was not exactly alive, but it was surely undead. ↗

— Jim Trombetta

#nuclear #science #science

Maligned –powerfully-drawn characters acting out a disturbing view of our future.” -David Compton, New York Times Best-Selling author ↗

— Kathleen Papajohn

#romance #science-fiction #thriller #science

She was never going to get used to how much the Faeries seem to stare at her, as if dissecting her and examining the little pieces inside her like a science project.~Ever Fire: A Dark Faerie Tale #2 ↗

— Alexia Purdy

#faeries #fairy #fey #paranormal #ya

Yeah, but will it hurt?”’ I asked. “This is science, Zach,” Randy said, reassuringly, as he tilted my head back and lowered the lens to my eye. “Of course it will hurt. ↗

— John Zakour

#sci-fi #sci-fi-humour-comedy #science

It was the end of the October term of my sophomore year, and everything was petty normal, except for Social Studies, which was no big surprise. Mr. Dimas, who taught the class, had a reputation for unconventional teaching methods. For midterms he had blindfolded us, then had us each stick a pin in a map of the world and we got to write essays on wherever the pin stuck. I got Decatur, Illinois. Some of the guys complained because they drew places like Ulan Bator or Zimbabwe. They were lucky. YOU try writing ten thousand words on Decatur, Illinois. ↗

— Neil Gaiman

#science-fiction #science

To establish that a rule is likely to be true, one must try to prove it false. ↗

— Stuart Sutherland

#science #science

The energy and daring is to resist the noes, until the final yes has been achieved. ↗

— Jeffrey D. Sachs

#future #science #sustainability #science

All space is relative. There is no such thing as size. The telescope and the microscope have produced a deadly leveling of great and small, far and near. The only little thing is sin, the only great thing is fear! ("The Jelly-Fish") ↗

— David H. Keller

#fear #relativity #scale #science #size

There were long stretches of DNA in between genes that didn't seem to be doing very much; some even referred to these as "junk DNA," though a certain amount of hubris was required for anyone to call any part of the genome "junk," given our level of ignorance. ↗

— Francis S. Collins

#biology #dna #hubris #human-genome #ignorance